Color Is Subjective

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Probably the hardest concept to fully grasp about color is that color is all in your head. Literally. It’s a sensation, just like touch. Like any other sensation it’s (usually) caused by physical reality. But it doesn’t have any physical reality of it’s own–at least not outside your body. And–this is the hard part–color is not a property of the thing that’s causing the sensation. In other words, grass is not green and the sky is not blue. Rather, they have physical properties that make you perceive green and blue, but even that’s true only in some circumstances.

It’s easier to understand this concept–to separate out the difference between an object’s properties and the sensation you get from those properties–if you think about your sense of touch rather than your sense of color.

If someone touches you on the arm, for example, you can feel the touch, and the feeling is certainly caused by the physical reality of the finger touching your skin. But it probably wouldn’t even occur to you to think of the feeling as a property of the other person’s finger. It’s obviously not; rather, it’s a sensation that’s happening in your own body.

In fact, the sensation you feel can vary depending on the condition of your skin. The same touch that can feel gentle or even soothing under most conditions can be painful if you have a sunburn, for example. But in either case, the physical reality of the touch would be the same. And in either case, the sensation is all internal. The pressure of the finger stimulates internal sensors in your body, those sensors register the touch and report the sensation to your brain.

Color works exactly the same way. And that needs to be stressed: This is not an analogous situation. It’s the same thing; because color is also a sensation. Light reaches your eye, it stimulates the sensors in your eye, those sensors register photons, and they report the sensation to your brain. It’s your visual system that decides on a color.

This idea of color as a sensation rather than an intrinsic property of an object is a subtle distinction, but it’s not a trivial one or some sort of academic hairsplitting. It’s central to understanding why it’s so hard to match colors–whether between two devices like a printer and camera or between any given device and the real world.

Consider: The color you see for any given object depends, in part, on the light you see it under. An extreme example of this is that the color of your car will likely change so much under sodium lamps that you may have trouble finding it in a parking lot at night. But, as you may know, colors change even with less extreme lighting conditions–when moving from a room lit with incandescent bulbs to daylight for example.

If color were an intrinsic property of an object, and it was only the perceived color that changed under different lighting conditions, you could match the object’s intrinsic color in printed output, say, under any lighting conditions, and the colors would then match under all conditions. However, because color is not an intrinsic property of the object but rather a sensation, the only thing you can match is the sensation that a particular color induces in your visual sensory system. That sensation will change under different lighting conditions, and it will usually change differently for different objects. So the best you can do is match colors under specific lighting conditions.

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

ExtremeTech Newsletter

Subscribe Today to get the latest ExtremeTech news delivered right to your inbox.

Email

This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.